(Optimum 20-bit
Hi-D transfers from the original 1986 master mixes, cleaned and
tweaked to a fare-thee-well. The best this album
has ever
sounded.)

On
this 1986 recording, Wendy Carlos breaks through the bounds
imposed by traditional orchestra and electronic sounds as well as
conventional tuning scales. Beauty In The Beast derives from basic
music forms a new music which defies categorization, as it allows
one's imagination and emotions to run free, unfettered by any
preconceptions. As some listeners have put it, this is like a
"soundtrack to a dream," just ready to be
experienced!

Did you ever notice that there's beauty in
every beast of the earth, a quality of essential gorgeousness, just
below each fearsome exterior? Consider the carnivorous jungle tigers,
the majestic elephants of the savanna, or the white-plumed birds on
the cover of this album. All are decidedly "beastly," and yet all are
in truth exquisitely beautiful.A similar duality is evident in other worlds apart from
nature's. A clattering Model-T Ford is one example, and a complex
digital synthesizer as was used for all of this album is another. The
"familiar-yet-strange" timbres which you will hear have sort of a
beautiful plus beastly quality, and the same is
certainly true of all the unfamiliar tunings you'll encounter herein.
Thanks to such reasons and others, Beauty In
The Beast is among the most unusual music I've ever heard.
Yet I wrote it! How can this be?
To begin with, this has been the most exciting musical project in my
life. The year and a half to compose and record this music (following
the two years before that, laying the essential groundwork with
Digital Moonscapes) have produced
results far beyond my ideals when I set out to avoid the usual
constraints imposed by conventions of scale, and tuning, not to
mention instrumentation.It makes sense: if you put aside the traditional equally
tempered scale, and also standard acoustic and electronic sounds and
timbres, and assemble a composition and performance instrument based
on anything else, that alone guarantees unique results. If you
are really lucky you will find yourself located at the right time and
place to have an instrument capable of producing (to say it simply)
whatever the human ear and brain like best. All theoretical
concerns remain secondary to that pragmatic, humanly rewarding
goal.You now hold in your hands an album of calculated guesses as
to the music of the perhaps not too distant future, an encomium to
all past and present earthly made (but no longer earthly bound)
music. A music which at once terrifies with its beastly strangeness,
while it seduces with a never-before-heard beauty. Enjoy!

1: Incantation-- In Himalayan monasteries monks
gather in solemn dignity to bestow upon God a sound so awesome that
no mere mortal can be left unmoved. In this fantasy, prayer-wheels
and Tibetan bells are combined with subharmonic voices and an
orchestra of drums, cymbals, hand bells. shawms, and several kinds of
horns, all in the tritone rich authentic scales from Bhutan and
Tibet.2: Beauty In The
Beast-- The title cut of the
album, this compact piece whimsically blends two quasi grotesque
ideas with a romantic theme in best "Ballet Russe" style. The new
scales used for all of this are quite odd the first heard called
Beta, splits the perfect fourth into two equal parts (actually
eight equal steps of nearly 64 cents each ), the second,
Alpha, does the same to the minor third (four equal steps for
78 c. each). While both scales have nearly perfect triads two
remarkable coincidences!), neither can build a standard diatonic
scale, and so the melodic motion is strange and exotic. The two
forces, beast and beauty, shift back and forth, and
things are never quite what they seem.3: Poem For Bali-- While in Bali in 1983 (chasing
a total solar eclipse) I fell in love with this island, its culture
and people and their love of the arts. (Note that the cover painting
is from Bali. ) I still cannot get the sound of its music from my
ears. "Poem for Bali" is an homage written to express these emotions.
The ten-section continuous work is composed wholly in the Pelog and
Slendro tunings of their rich gamelan tradition, but filtered through
my decidedly western point of view. Section four is based on the
Barong dance; I performed it on a close replica of their Gamelan
ensemble. Section nine is really a mini-concerto for such an
ensemble, accompanied by a western symphonic orchestra (sadly this
can't be done in the acoustic world due to tuning conflicts). The
rest paints an impressionistic canvas of moods amenable to this
magical island.4: Just
Imaginings -- How exciting
that the computer controlled digital synthesizer age has arrived. We
can finally "have our cake and eat it, too!" In the past we had to
choose between perfect tuning (a just intonation), or totally free
modulations (an equal-step temperament), and most of us chose the
latter. This composition is all perfectly tuned in a "Super-Just"
scale I call the Harmonic Scale, which continues past the 5th
harmonic of just, all the way to the (prime) 19th harmonic! But then,
in a 144 notes per octave slight of hand, it modulates all over,
including two circles of fifths,
at the main climaxes to section
one (Kaleidoscope) and
three (Dreams).
Section two (Chroma) combines
polytonal clusters of "super-just" chords with a busier foreground.
This contrasts with the more upbeat first, and stream of
consciousness third sections, both etudes in contrast and
surprise.5: That's Just
Itand
6:
Yusae-Aisae -- These two
closely-related pieces, written immediately before "Just Imaginings,"
are also in the Harmonic Scale. They are my studies in
learning how to control the Harmonic Scale, before I began to
modulate with it. Both also explore some of the more unusual melodic
intervals of this scale, which while more acoustically satisfying to
the human ear than the arbitrary intervals of equal temperament, have
remained difficult to obtain up until now, and so are seldom heard.
That's too bad, because we've really been deprived of all the
gorgeous exotic modes and harmonies of tuning in the natural
way, instead of the mathematical way we've been tied to these past
300 years, since Papa Bach adopted it as the best available
compromise.The point of departure for "That's Just It" is an imaginary
jazz sextet, with solo trumpet and tenor sax. "Yusae-Aisae" conjures
a Hollywoodesque Mid-Eastern marketplace. While both pieces use
exactly the same tuning, to western ears the slithery arabesques of
"That's Just It" may sound peculiar, but the latter quite authentic.
I suspect that an arab musician would hold the opposite opinion: the
Harmonic Scale is no more an arabic tuning than Chow Mein is from
China!7: C'est Afrique
-- I've lucky to visit Africa
several times, and find the many cultures and musics of the African
people every bit as captivating as those of Bali. This piece is my
first attempt to suggest a (tiny) portion of their art. It has four
short sections, all in the authentic tunings, which are not too
different from our own. There can't be any more rhythmically
sophisticated music than African, and that's what these four
sections, with their quasi-realistic timbres and extrapolations, are
about. (As with the Gamelan sections of "Poem For Bali," they were
surprisingly tricky, but also a lot of fun to play!)8: A Woman's Song-- By combining ideas from
several regions we arrive at the elegant final work of BitB. The
melody, based on a song by a Bulgarian Shepherdess (the woman of the
title), is titled: "Izel je Delyo Hajdutin." To that long-flowing
melisma I've added the tambura and dilruba from India (replacing the
Bulgarian bagpipes), and an appropriate raga tuning. Western horns
and crotales, plus several hybrid timbres round out the
orchestration. While no synthesizer is yet any match for Valya
Balkanska's electric mezzo soprano (whose performance was included on
the Voyager records), the instrumental version here forms an
appropriately haunting conclusion for all of our beastly beauties.

I've said it before, in interviews and on
my website (www.wendycarlos.com):Beauty In The Beast is my
most important album. I don't mean in historic significance, as
Switched-On Bach clearly left the
largest crater I'm likely to impress on the face of music and media.
But that consisted mostly in demonstrating what ought to have been
perfectly apparent for some time: electronic music was a new
medium, not a kind of music. There was good and bad,
human and mechanical, exciting and dull electronic music, the same as
any other music. This remains true today, for better or (too often)
for worse.The repertoire we chose on S-O
B, sort of a "Bach's Greatest Hits," was both familiar and
well-suited to the limits of the early Moog Synthesizer. The
pioneering was in the execution, and we didn't do a bad job of it.
Even I found myself smiling when remastering those performances for
the Switched-On Boxed Set some
months ago. Still, my fondness for
Beauty is deeper and more
personal.Walt Disney admitted years after completing "Fantasia" how he
had been surprised by its lack of success at first release--both the
general audience and classical music aficionados were initially
unimpressed. He added: "but this was what we ought to have been
doing, and I've never been sorry we made it."Beauty in the Beast is what I
ought to have been doing: an idea whose time had come. It represents
baby steps along a new path, but carefully gone back over many times
to hide the stumbles. Happily it holds up remarkably well, band-aids
and all. I hope that many of you just discovering it for the first
time may agree, once you give it a chance to work some unfamiliar
magic on you.

Audio
Note

Beauty in the Beast was
recorded originally on a customized 16-track 2" (M-56) tape machine,
using Dolby, then mixed directly to PCM-F1 digital. For this new
edition we began with the original masters, and meticulously
fine-tuned, cleaned and optimized each track using Hi-D equipment, as
with the other ESD masters in this series. You may rest assured that
this is the best these recordings have ever sounded.

What
they're saying about it:(Initial Reviews,
to be updated. A big thanks to all who contributed!)

(East Side Digital's Blurb:)

Wendy Carlos - Beauty in the Beast(ESD 81552 enhanced CD)

Beauty in the Beast is Wendy
Carlos's haunting "world music" album: eight compositions that
explore instruments and musical forms such as Tibetan gongs, Balinese
gamelan, African rhythms, and Bulgarian melodies. A "soundtrack to a
dream," now ready to be experienced!Released only briefly in 1986, BitB is
considered by many to be Carlos's most important album. Each track is
an adventure in exotic timbres and ear-catching tunings.

Not only is Wendy Carlos a pioneer in electronic music in using
the synthesiser, her involvement and contributions to the development
of the beasts of circuitry has made her somewhat of an electronic
genetic engineer. Loosely modelled after Holst's The Planets,
Digital Moonscapes (originally
released in 1984) was a rather traditional yet adventurous musical
impression made by various planets and moons in the solar system. The
album would also serve to be the world's first "orchestra" to be
conducted and created completely within the electronic realm.While somewhat serving as a practical excuse for Carlos to
manipulate and mutate technology to create a more realistic sounding
digital orchestra, it wasn't until two years later that she would
break ground with the legendary Beauty In
The Beast, a meisterwerk on all levels. It is a surreal,
Hieronymous Bosch-like musical interpretation of what lies beneath
normality, and inspired by her world travels. After having endlessly
tweaked each sound and circuit by ear, Carlos took things to the next
level by somehow applying "magical" attributes to her library of
orchestral sounds, which are otherwise humanly impossible to do with
the real instruments. Somehow, these sounds become animals in their
own right, sometimes even emitting bizarre emotions that are felt for
the most part as too new, raw and peregrine to be able to
describe.As with her film score for A
Clockwork Orange, these two sparkling, remastered reissues
are the definitive versions to obtain, as not only is the sound
astronomically better but Carlos' own infatuatingly in-depth liner
notes are more informative than most encyclopaedias.

Synthesist
Carlos expands the vocabulary of the electronic keyboard on this
remarkable album, built around Middle Eastern, Balinese, and African
scales--a groundbreaking performance.Beauty In The Beast is a
formidable recording, a manifesto for
the synthesizer in the global
village. Carlos digitally
hand-crafted her own global orchestra, coupling hybrid instruments
and timbres that are remarkably true to form, from the roaring
Tibetan trumpets that open the album to the gendér xylophones
and suling flutes. Carlos' alternate tunings, which make the melodies
sound like they're being bent in a fun house mirror, may throw off
some listeners, but once your ears adjust, it adds to the
otherworldly force of a music born in both technology and ancient
cultures.

Wendy Carlos: "Beauty in the
Beast"(originally appeard in Keyboard magazine, April
1987)

In
her last couple of albums, Wendy Carlos has succeeded in
accomplishing completely what "Switched-On Bach" only foreshadowed:
As far as the listener need be aware, there is no longer any
difference between a symphony orchestra and a multi-track synthesizer
realization (see
Digital
Moonscapes).
If "Beauty !n The Beast" were noteworthy only for its stunning
instrument replicas (and extrapolations thereon) it would qualify as
a stunt--a virtuoso stunt, to be sure, but no more. The exotic
tunings? Again, fascinating stuff. But how does the album stand up as
music.?

Well, 'stand up' may not be quite the right
phrase. It hops out of the speakers
and parades around the room wrapped in a copy of "The New York
Times". It tastes like chocolate and smells like
gasoline.It plays better
backgammon than you do. In other words, yes, this is real music. And
more. Not content to adapt the resources of existing styles to her
new needs, Carlos has broken through to a new vocabulary of
composition, in which primitive elements are blended with Romantic
symphonic scoring and a dash of electronic eclecticism. The operative
word is 'blended'; from beginning to end, "Beauty In The Beast" is
one experience.

The tunings add a lot to the impact, of
course. Those of you who picked up last November's Keyboard have
already had a chance to hear some excerpts from "Beauty !n The Beast"
on our Soundpage. If you missed the Soundpage (or even if you
didn't), do yourself a favor: Buy the album. The effect of the
tunings is difficult to describe, but once heard, it cannot easily be
forgotten. Or is it the tunings that create such an impression? Are
we, perhaps, hearing and responding to vibrant, expressive music that
just happens to use unusual tunings? Which came first, the chicken or
the egg? Well, no chicken ever sprouted this kind of foliage. A bird
of paradise, maybe.

"Beauty In The Beast" is a CD unlike any
other. This is new, unearthly music that cannot be categorized.
Terrifying and seductive all at once, this is a "soundtrack to a
dream" by the world's greatest living musician...

... REVIEW:

If "Beauty In The Beast" does indeed
represent the music of the future, then the future is gonna kick
ass.This CD is my all-time favorite,
the one I would take with me if I were to be stranded on a desert
island. "Beauty In The Beast" is
unlike any other CD I've ever heard. It cannot be categorized under
any of the familiar labels. "New age", "ambient" or "world music"
would seem to fit best, though Wendy Carlos would cringe at being
described with any of those labels.

"Beauty In The Beast" is unique in several
ways. First and foremost, Carlos has started by throwing out the
foundation for all Western music since the 1700's: The twelve-tone
equal temperament scale. In its place, she has substituted a wide
variety of different tunings. Some of these tunings are traditional
tunings from various cultures; others were invented by Carlos. And
there's more here than just exotic tunings. The all-digital timbres
possess nuances normally found only in acoustic instruments. The
orchestration is flawless, and her sense of form superb. She has paid
a great deal of attention to the details, and this makes "Beauty In
The Beast" a truly unique listening experience... for those who enjoy
world music, those who love experimental music, and those who like a
challenge. I genuinely believe that Wendy Carlos is the world's
greatest living musician; after hearing "Beauty In The Beast", you
will too.

A new BitB review by Carol Wright forBarnes & Noble.com(to go to the <bn.com> site and view
Carlos's listings, CLICK
HERE;
to read a recent Wright bn.com interview with Carlos,
CLICK
HERE)

Like a comet flashing across the musical
sky, Wendy Carlos's Beauty in the Beast had a brief but
spectacular life before her original record label went bankrupt and
shot the critically acclaimed album out of circulation. Now Carlos
has remastered the 1987 masterpiece, on which she added to the
digital orchestrations she had created for Digital Moonscapes
with electronic world instruments such as the Balinese gamelan,
Tibetan trumpets, marimbas, and the Indian tamboura. These sounds are
a little less unfamiliar nowadays since world music is more
mainstream, so they may not feel as "beastly" to Western ears as when
Carlos first let them loose on unsuspecting listeners. But then,
Carlos never set out here to make a world music album, but instead
designed digital replicas of these ethnic instruments to add unusual
new sounds to her customized synthesizer."Incantation" opens the album; its
blast-open-the-heavens aesthetic builds waves of Tibetan chanting,
acrid trumpets, and the tangy clash of bells, only to fade
suspensefully to the clickity-clack sound of a prayer wheel. Carlos
successfully captures the ear-jarring imperfections of these
instruments and the free-for-all timing typical of a Tibetan
ensemble. The breathtaking "Poem for Bali" uses two tunings unique to
the gamelan orchestra; passages fly by like banners unfurled over
tropical treetops. Intriguing, polyrhythmic layers of horns, chimes,
and percussion play tag, and the gamelan players bang out flurries of
melody on their metal keys. "That's Just It" and "Yusae-Aisae" use a
harmonic scale of Carlos's own invention; the first is played as a
jazz sextet, while the second invokes a slithery, Hollywoodesque
Middle Eastern marketplace. "C'est Afrique" is a delight of
polyrhythms, with Vocoder-produced village chanters. But "A Woman's
Song" is Carlos's most sublime piece of all, a mélange of a
Bulgarian shepherdess song, Indian ragas, and hybrid instruments.
Indeed, some of the sounds are beastly on the ears at first, but
Carlos has tamed them so that we may stroke the rare fur of their
hides.

--Carol Wright

Going where no other musician goesNovember 25, 2000
Reviewer: Dave Hartl from Telford, PA United States

What you have here is something no other
musician is doing to the degree Wendy Carlos is: exploration of
alternative tunings in original music using synthesizers, while
sounding like an acoustic assemblage of world musicians. This CD was
called a soundtrack for a dream by others, and that really describes
it for me.This came out in 1986 on a label that
went under shortly after it was released, so very few got to hear it.
As a synthesizer player, it changed the way I thought about music and
electronic music, as revelatory as Switched On Bach was in its
day. At first, I couldn't take it. It sounded so out of tune and
strange! But as I kept listening to it, I found a whole new standard
of beauty, like falling in love with an ugly child.For years, I spent many hours driving
across the New Jersey pines at night with no interruptions. This
album was my soundtrack for those crossings for years (coupled with
Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, a perfect pairing). It was
transporting,mystical, and intriguing, and the ride always was over
before I was ready.At last! I've been waiting for years for
this one to become available on CD. Take advantage of it now that
it's here!

John DiLiberto (JazzIz magazine),
in a featured Amazon.com CD review

From the roar of Tibetan horns and the clangor of metal percussion
that opens Beauty in the Beast, Wendy Carlos in 1986 signaled
a new direction for her music. Beauty in the Beast is Carlos's
magnum opus, an album that should have established the synthesizer's
role in the new global music landscape. More than that, it should
have established Carlos as a composer and not just a Switched-on Bach
jukebox. But not too many people were listening. Re-released now
after 14 years, Beauty in the Beast has lost none of its power.
Carlos is both profound and poignant, dissonant and disarming on
Beauty, as she fuses a global orchestra from her synthesizers."Poem for Bali" is the centerpiece of
the album, an episodic, 17-minute excursion as Carlos orchestrates
the sounds and rhythms of a digital gamelan orchestra. In addition to
replicating the metallophones, gongs, and flutes of the traditional
gamelan, she creates her own hybrid sound designs, giving this work a
surreal and sometimes harrowing tone, like a dream bent through fun
house mirrors. But then there are pieces such as "A Woman's Song,"
based on a Balkan melody. The title track merges nightmare landscapes
and a crazed carnival calliope with a haunting theme that sounds like
a lament for the end of the world. Beauty in the Beast is an
essential recording of both modern composition and synthesis--Carlos
should plug into this circuit again.

A new review of the remastered Beauty,
from the January 2001 issue of Keyboard Magazine

Originally
released as an LP in 1986 on Larry Fast's ill-fated Audion label,
Beauty in the Beast has been unavailable for the past 14 years
-- a tragedy, as it's arguably Carlos's most important album. But
now, thanks to East Side Digital, Carlos is remastering and
re-releasing her entire back catalog, and Beauty is back. A
near-perfect mesh of unusual tunings and painstakingly constructed
additive synthesis programs played on her customized Synergy
synthesizers, the music is as astonishing today as when it was first
recorded, transporting the listener to an exotic world where
seemingly acoustic timbres morph into sonorous creatures from other
places and times. Plus, the new release is an Enhanced-CD with photos
of Wendy's evolving studio and even of her Siamese cats. If all you
know about her is Switched-On Bach, you're in for a treat (and
I don't mean the cats).

This
November 2000 re-release by East Side Digital is highly welcome. Not
only is the album repackaged and remastered, but finally the album
will actually be available, which it before only was for 3 brief
months in 1987. Beauty in the Beast is Carlos' "world music" album,
featuring explorations of exotic instruments and sounds from Tibet,
Bali and Bulgaria, among others. The idea of the music is to look at
the beauty that lies "just below each fearsome exterior" of beasts of
the earth - and I assume - not only animal ugliness, from a musical
perspective. What immediately strikes me upon
the very first listen is that this is not the kind of album you start
playing as background music to household chores. That kind of
listening doesn't give me much from this album. I really have to sit
down, maybe with the lights switched off and maybe with headphones,
and listen closely to the carefully crafted textures and
arrangements. Otherwise the beauty of what could be perceived as
noise and random structures might get lost. I tribute this to Carlos'
idea about having to look closer and beyond the superficial ugliniess
to discover the beauty, so in that sense she achieved perfectly her
intention, at least to this listener. The music is 100% digital, made
in the mid 80s, and yet the programming of sounds is so good that I
do not find any of the harsh digitalness that most mid 80s digital
music suffered from. In fact, the guy with the biggest synthesizer
budget in the world, Jean-Michel Jarre, made an album at the same
time which sounds more 80s and more dated that Beauty in the Beast,
which sounds almost not dated at all. I am impressed by the quality
of the programming. Musically, the album presents
everything from sparkling improvised-like bursts of exotic electronic
sounds, to ambient, low-key passages and "sequencer patterns" that
are actually replications of real-life drumming. There are a few
melodic sections, but the album is mainly focused on textures and
experimental arrangements, sometimes with lead instruments with
non-melodic or non-harmonic themes, although it must be said I have
heard records that deal even more with atonal arrangements. The music
here is not unpleasant, but not exactly the kind of stuff you try to
get your kids to whistle. Because 15 years have passed
since this album was made, it may not sound as exotic today as it did
then, but a true work of art will not diminish with time.